It’s Allen’s best film in years, an authentic-feeling deconstruction of a life. It isn’t always easy to watch. It isn’t exactly fun (although parts are funny). Blanchett’s performance sometimes overpowers the story. But it’s an essential work in Allen’s later canon.

It Comes at Night is soaked in uncertainty. It makes us uncomfortable because we want answers and can’t have them. And if there’s anyone who knows how to make an audience uncomfortable, it’s writer and director Trey Edward Shults.

Please Give is an almost perfectly rendered slice of life, buoyant with wonderful performances.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is not a great piece of cinema, exactly, but it delivers on what it promises, time and again.

Roadrunner, however, lays out a convincing case that Bourdain was in pain for much of his life, desperate for answers. But even he may not have known the questions.

The Dark Divide will win over nature lovers with stunning visuals and an overarching message about the importance of conserving our unpredictable planet and relishing the beauty of exploring it.

As with First Reformed, Schrader crashes right through the boundaries separating the literal from the surreal. It is a strange journey, increasingly so, but an immensely satisfying one.

Johns makes it all bearable. Inviting, even. His performance has such a gentle humanity, especially in the darkest scenes, that you can’t turn away. You don’t just root against the system. You root for him, and that’s an important distinction.

The Dark Knight Rises brings the Batman story to a close in enormous, satisfying fashion, not just on the huge scale it builds for itself, but on a human level as well.

The Lost City of Z is a throwback, an epic film about a grand adventure.

For fans, counting up how many superheroes can emerge from the clown car of one three-hour movie is half the fun. For casual moviegoers — say, those who might skip minor installments such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — it accounts for half the exhaustion, a bit of world-building fatigue to go along with the sensory overload of a fantasy realm that seems stuck in perpetual apocalypse.

A fantastically entertaining movie.

Blue Ruin is a movie about revenge, but it reaches far past the bottom-shelf titillations of fantasy to tell a richer, character-driven story with a protagonist who's less avenging angel than ghost.

It's great when a movie messes with your head. And Ex Machina, screenwriter Alex Garland's directorial debut, does just that, pretty much from start to finish. The writer of "28 Days Later" and "Sunshine" purports to examine A.I., or artificial intelligence. What he's really after is something at once more exotic and more relatable — and infinitely less predictable: human nature.

The Tribe is that rare breed of film so masterful in execution it requires watching once, yet so devastating you may never be able to stomach seeing it again.

More than anything, The Sisters Brothers is an exploration of how far you can take an anti-Western before it snaps out of the genre’s orbit entirely.

What it lacks in thematic innovation it more than makes up for with enough memorable characters and visual splendor to make Zootopia a perennial Disney favorite.

A Love Song is, no doubt, a small movie (it only lasts 81 minutes), a miniature study of a life. But it is an oddly compelling one. And Dickey and Studi masterfully make the difficult look easy.

Although not everyone in the cast is as comfortable with the dialogue as Acker, for whom it seems natural, there is a clear love for the material here in every performance, in every shot. It’s not stuffy or remote. It’s fun.

For all its heart and beauty, The Breadwinner sputters a bit to a close. Its themes are undeniable — one walks away feeling angry and empowered. But with the story’s soft focus, one soon forgets why.

Ultimately it's Wasikowska's performance that captivates. It's oddly compelling — she doesn't say much, and what she does say is usually off-putting. But there is a fierceness in her eyes as she walks, a determination that almost dares you to look away.

Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's see-it-to-believe-it feature debut as a director, goes from agreeably strange to weird to surreal, but its brilliance lies in how it never stops feeling real, genuine, lived-in.

War is much on the minds of people right now, and 1917 is a good reminder, flaws and all, of what that really entails. The contradiction, of course, is that it is not one long slog through gorgeous sunsets, but a million little moments that make up the effort. That’s kind of the movie Mendes made, and yet it’s not. You want to feel a movie like this, but too often you simply appreciate it.

As a cinematic diatribe set in a stark moral universe, Goldstone comes in loud and clear.

It’s only Fargeat’s second feature after 2017’s “Revenge.” That was a good movie. “The Substance” is a substantial leap forward and a film people will rightfully be talking about for a while.

I liked the movie — it’s certainly well made, and a lot of fun — but I mostly found myself laughing at it, not with it.

[Denis] definitely never holds back from shocking the audience with multiple sudden deaths, haunting rape scenes and various graphic moments. But with such little character development, why invest in these stories?

Even at its most disgusting, and it does get disgusting, the film is engrossing. It’s not that you can’t look away. It’s that you want to look and look again. That’s the lure of the vampire. And it’s the lure of “Nosferatu,” Eggers’ best film (at least so far).